Are you as scared as I am? What are we going to do? How are we going to survive this transition?
I speak not of the Y2K bug, the threat of terrorism, and all that goes along with the turning of the year, the century, and the millenium. These are perhaps more serious concerns than the [...]
Reading from Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (1956)
In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.Sanctity in [...]
Most Sunday mornings, I only get to hear sermons by me. But over the years, I have gotten to hear others preach, even on the theme of Thanksgiving.
I was thinking recently of one such sermon, and of one person’s reaction to that sermon. The message of the sermon was this: We have a tendency to [...]
When the church year began, I had not planned to preach about Akhenaten, onetime pharaoh of Egypt. In fact, none of the pharaohs was on my list of likely sermon subjects.
I did make reference to Akhenaten in a sermon earlier this fall, though not here. I gave a homily one Sunday afternoon at our church [...]
I have had Elizabeth Tarbox on my mind a lot this week. Elizabeth
was the author of two meditation manuals published by the UUA, the first in
1993, when she was minister of our church in Middleboro, Mass., and the
other five years later, by which time she had become minister of our church
in Cohasset.
For the few decades [...]
I noticed it last year and the year before but it has gotten worse. Entirely out of hand, gross, bizarre and down right morbid: Halloween decorations and costumes. Halloween used to be marked with a carefully carved pumpkin on their front steps. Its flickering candle fearlessly held back the darkening cold of impending winter.
These days [...]
I offer special greetings to any of you who are here at the encouragement of a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, or a family member. I want to assure you that it is not my intention to convert you to our religious way of life. There will be no altar call, nor will you be [...]
Reading from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dosteovsky[A man seeks advice from a monastic elder.]
“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams I often went so far as to [...]
Fashions change, the spotlight moves on, the cultural heroes of today are forgotten tomorrow, but somehow through it all, generation after generation, the influence of some people just keeps on going. Giants in their day disappear; who reads Swinburne any more, or Tennyson, Longfellow, or Ford Maddox Ford? Meanwhile, every year brings fresh productions of [...]
Unitarian Universalists are fond of the joke that if you put thirteen Unitarian Universalists in a room and asked them to define Unitarian Universalism you would get thirteen different answers. Do it with the same people next week and they will give you different answers. We all have different and constantly shifting ways of saying [...]
Just about every year, the governing board of this congregation, a group called the Parish Committee, goes on a one-day retreat at the start of the new church year, and they did that again eight days ago. The ministers and the intern go, too, and often others, like last year, the newly-installed lay ministers, or [...]
(reflecting as usual on some of those who died in the previous twelve months, presented here in a longer version, much reduced in the giving; also included in the service were three hymns by Carl Seaburg, a dozen poems for children and others by Shel Silverstein, and a reflection by the student intern, Robin Zucker, [...]